News For Trend: September 2020

Wednesday, 30 September 2020

Bank warned ministers Covid loans were fraud risk

The government was told in May its bounce back loans were at "very high risk of fraud" from organised crime.

from BBC News - Business https://ift.tt/36mKqZ8

How controversial data firm Palantir hit $22bn

The rise of the US tech company has been shadowed by concerns about privacy and surveillance.

from BBC News - Business https://ift.tt/3jihqWf

'I worked a five hour shift and got paid nothing'

A 19-year-old woman begins a campaign to ban unpaid work trials after working a shift for no pay.

from BBC News - Business https://ift.tt/34fqvsm

Start with clients 'at the bottom of the fishtank'

Recruitment boss Richard Spencer-Percival says "start off at the bottom with your clients, then you can pick off the big game".

from BBC News - Business https://ift.tt/33hgNGN

A grandfather, a grandson and a bucket of old baseballs going viral

Ethan Anderson's grandfather cleaned out his garage and decided it was time for the bucket of baseballs to go. He left a note with them at a batting cage. They went viral which make it even better for a grandfather who doesn't use social media.

from www.espn.com - TOP https://ift.tt/36lrREP

A grandfather, a grandson and a bucket of old baseballs going viral

Add it to the list: Herro Ball joins iconic sports frenzies

Linsanity and Minshew Mania walked so Herro Ball could run. The Miami Heat's supremely confident rookie, Tyler Herro, is the latest star on a long list of athletes who inspired outright frenzies during the past decade.

from www.espn.com - NBA https://ift.tt/2SdRYFf

A grandfather, a grandson and a bucket of old baseballs going viral

A major Boston hospital has a cluster of cases among its staff and patients.

By BY GIULIA MCDONNELL NIETO DEL RIO from NYT World https://ift.tt/2HMcPh5

Trump Renews Fears of Voter Intimidation as G.O.P. Poll Watchers Mobilize

By BY DANNY HAKIM, STEPHANIE SAUL, NICK CORASANITI AND MICHAEL WINES from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2Sc4nJI

Hopeful Day in Queens: A Slice of Pizza, Served Indoors

By BY MATTHEW HAAG from NYT New York https://ift.tt/3ihxplS

Pennsylvania’s top election official casts doubt on fraud claims in Luzerne County.

By BY NICK CORASANITI from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2SeAx7K

Republicans Scold Trump on White Supremacy, Fearing a Drag on the Party

By BY ALEXANDER BURNS, JONATHAN MARTIN AND MAGGIE HABERMAN from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/33ffFU4

Coronavirus

By Unknown Author from NYT World https://ift.tt/2Sda5Lt

Rebuffed by Vatican, Pompeo Assails China and Aligns With Pope’s Critics

By BY JASON HOROWITZ AND LARA JAKES from NYT World https://ift.tt/3l1QP02

U.S. Repatriates Last of Islamic State Suspects Believed Captured in Syria

By BY KATIE BENNER from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/3cPgmqb

M.L.B. Will Allow Fans at World Series and N.L. Championship Series

By BY TYLER KEPNER from NYT Sports https://ift.tt/3cMwKI6

Movie theaters say they can’t survive without aid from Congress.

By BY BROOKS BARNES from NYT Business https://ift.tt/36iZAyA

Now at the Boarding Gate: Coronavirus Tests

By BY TARIRO MZEZEWA from NYT Travel https://ift.tt/3jiab0d

A grandfather, a grandson and a bucket of old baseballs going viral

Paris Chef Commits Suicide After Assault Allegations, Family Says

By BY NORIMITSU ONISHI from NYT World https://ift.tt/3l2Qieg

Study Finds ‘Single Largest Driver’ of Coronavirus Misinformation: Trump

By BY SHERYL GAY STOLBERG AND NOAH WEILAND from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/34jHpX4

A grandfather, a grandson and a bucket of old baseballs going viral

Tuesday, 29 September 2020

Trump Sent a Warning. Let’s Take It Seriously.

By BY THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN from NYT Opinion https://ift.tt/30kXM4d

The Morning

By Unknown Author from NYT Briefing https://ift.tt/30iPOZs

Barrett told senators that Trump offered her the nomination much sooner than previously known.

By BY NICHOLAS FANDOS from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2EKgCu1

Top Intelligence Official Releases Unverified, Previously Rejected Russia Information

By BY JULIAN E. BARNES, ADAM GOLDMAN AND NICHOLAS FANDOS from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/33dw773

Live Debate Analysis: Trump vs Biden

By BY THE NEW YORK TIMES from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/34dnCIH

Twins’ Playoff Misery Continues, Courtesy of the Depleted Astros

By BY TYLER KEPNER from NYT Sports https://ift.tt/3ieKlZY

In the Breonna Taylor Case, a Battle of Blame Over the Grand Jury

By BY SHAILA DEWAN, WILL WRIGHT AND JOHN ELIGON from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/3kYO1AO

Cuomo and De Blasio Need a United Front on Coronavirus Hot Spots

By BY THE EDITORIAL BOARD from NYT Opinion https://ift.tt/2G2aIW0

Chris Christie helped run Trump’s debate prep. He’ll also be a debate pundit for ABC.

By BY MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/34970Sm

Presidential debate season begins with an unpredictable and unnerving first matchup.

By BY GLENN THRUSH from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2HEBF2d

Coronavirus

By Unknown Author from NYT World https://ift.tt/30haLDW

Crocs Won 2020

By BY SANDRA E. GARCIA AND JONAH ENGEL BROMWICH from NYT Style https://ift.tt/30kVD8F

Judge Scrutinizes Justice Dept. Request to Drop Michael Flynn Case

By BY CHARLIE SAVAGE AND ADAM GOLDMAN from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/3mYRMYR

Mack jabs Calipari, then says Kentucky-L'ville on

Chris Mack offered a sarcastic response to John Calipari's assertion that Louisville doesn't want to play Kentucky this season: "I want to do what's most convenient for John and his program."

from www.espn.com - TOP https://ift.tt/3n3OIKU

Seattle Passes Minimum Pay Rate for Uber and Lyft Drivers

By BY NOAM SCHEIBER from NYT Business https://ift.tt/3kVevDd

Messi: Attempted exit was for Barca's own good

Lionel Messi says he acted with Barcelona's best interests in mind when trying to engineer a move away from Camp Nou this summer.

from www.espn.com - TOP https://ift.tt/33eCNSI

The Very Jewish R.B.G.

By BY JENNIFER WEINER from NYT Opinion https://ift.tt/30jqTFj

QB Mahomes, fiancée reveal baby on the way

Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes and fiancée Brittany Matthews announced on social media Tuesday that they will soon be having a baby.

from www.espn.com - TOP https://ift.tt/2HJ8wD9

Cats shed more coronavirus than dogs, but it’s unlikely they’ll infect their humans.

By BY JAMES GORMAN from NYT World https://ift.tt/3cOJC0j

Trump vs. Biden: Facing Off on Taming a ‘Rising China’

As President, Donald Trump has cast China as a global villain: a malevolent actor that all but launched a worldwide pandemic on an unsuspecting world, robbed Americans of their jobs and stole U.S. business secrets. He has made the Chinese Communist Party a catch-all enemy that pulls puppet-like strings to make international organizations like the World Health Organization work at cross-purposes with Washington, all charges Beijing vigorously denies.

At the same time, Trump has presented himself to the world—and to U.S. voters—as the only person capable of pummeling Beijing into submission, chiefly through a landmark trade deal. Democrats, the President and his allies say, are the willing patsies who bow to Beijing, as when former Vice President-turned-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden sought closer ties to the growing superpower in his multiple visits there. “A rising China is a positive, positive development, not only for China but for America and the world writ large,” Biden said in 2011 after returning to the U.S. from one such trip.

It’s a black-and-white narrative that will be argued on stage Tuesday night during the first Presidential debate in Cleveland, Ohio, with each man’s record and the COVID-19 pandemic on the debate docket. China will loom large for its role as Trump’s designated fall guy for the virus that has killed more than 200,000 Americans, for its economy, which is thriving despite the pandemic, and for its military, which could surpass America’s in size and strength by 2049.

Biden heads for the debate stage buoyed by an August Fox News poll that shows more Americans trust him over Trump to handle China. He is sure to point out Trump’s swings between painting China as an existential threat to the U.S. and effusive praise for Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

But many Trump supporters, if not most Americans, have become accustomed to Trump’s praise of strongmen in public, which in this case has given way to a barrage of insults, slamming Xi for letting the “Wuhan virus” spread. And Trump’s arguments that the Obama Administration was fooled by China could be persuasive on live television, says Michael Green, an Asia specialist from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The Trump Administration’s line,” says Green, a former Bush official who has backed Biden, “is that everybody was duped by China.” Green says that is “ridiculous and wrong…but it’s a pretty easy line to use in a debate.”

It will be tricky for Biden to counter these charges in clear terms to the American people. During his early years as Vice President, Washington and key allies like the U.K. were still hopeful of working with China, guardedly optimistic that Chinese Communist Party leaders could be carrot-pulled into more free-market, human-rights and democracy-oriented behavior.

The last year has seen China double down in a different direction. Its crackdown on Hong Kong demonstrators culminated in enacting a National Security Law on the region, decades ahead of the city’s agreed return to Chinese rule, and it has continued its crackdown on Muslim Uighurs, with hundreds of thousands reportedly sent to re-education camps.

The Trump Administration has accused Chinese leaders of being slow to tell the world how easily COVID-19 was spreading from person to person, and slow to admit a WHO team trying to investigate the outbreak. The Administration criticized China for releasing a DNA map of the virus without also sharing actual physical samples, which could help determine whether it jumped from animals or originated in a Chinese weapons lab, a popular but unsubstantiated theory among some in the GOP that is ridiculed by Chinese officials.

The Trump Administration has pursued a go-it-alone policy of using economic pain to bring Beijing to the negotiating table, aiming to check unfair trading practices and China’s aggressive militarization in the South China Sea. The Administration has slapped hundreds of billions of tariffs on Chinese goods, and imposed sanctions against alleged Chinese hackers accused of stealing U.S. intellectual property. The U.S. has also sanctioned Chinese officials who have cracked down on Hong Kong and the country’s Muslim Uighur minority.

The tough talk led to the January signing of the first phase of a trade deal, which keeps U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods largely intact, with the threat of more if China doesn’t follow through, and requires Beijing to buy upwards of $200 million in U.S. goods and services over the next two years. As of August, China has only bought $56.1 billion in U.S. goods, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and with Trump skewering Beijing verbally at every opportunity, doesn’t appear to be working to step up spending.

Meanwhile, China’s global exports rose this summer, mainly because of its dominance of personal protective equipment manufacturing and work-from-home technology, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, while the U.S. trade deficit with China has grown. The U.S.-China trade war had already cost 300,000 jobs since it started in early 2018, according to Moody Analytics, even before the coronavirus wreaked havoc on the U.S. job market.

Biden’s own approach to China, as outlined in his public comments so far, sounds like a Trump-lite trade policy with a side of wishful thinking that Beijing can still be coaxed back to better behavior by a concerted scolding by Washington and its allies. He told the Council on Foreign Relations he would double down on Trump’s sanctions over the Hong Kong security law and its detention of up to a million minority Uighurs, but he told NPR that he would lift tariffs on Chinese imports and work through international trade bodies like the WTO to bring Beijing to heel.

Biden claims a key tool to counter China would be to super-charge those measures in cooperation with allies, in part by renegotiating the Trump-abandoned Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal, an acronym that by itself can cause eyes to glaze, to band Pacific economies against Beijing. As Biden wrote in Foreign Affairs, “The most effective way to meet that challenge is to build a united front of U.S. allies and partners to confront China’s abusive behaviors and human rights violations, even as we seek to cooperate with Beijing on issues where our interests converge.”

Explaining that on stage on Tuesday would be a wonky turn likely lost on any popular audience, who may not remember that it was combined allied economic action against Iran that brought it to the negotiating table for the Iran nuclear deal, an argument that would draw scorn from most Republicans.

Trump, for his part, will likely argue that if a tougher tack had been taken sooner, it might have clipped Beijing’s wings—though some current and former U.S. military and intelligence officers will tell you China was always heading this way, citing hawkish books like The Hundred-Year Marathon, which relies on Chinese documents and defectors to claim, controversially, that China intends to replace the U.S. as a global superpower by 2049.

Trump has already previewed a debate attack to come on Biden’s son Hunter, who Trump has claimed made more than a billion dollars in an investment deal with the Bank of China, less than two weeks after flying there on his father’s plane in 2013, a charge that multiple fact-checks have found false. Hunter Biden’s spokesperson George Mesires tells TIME that he has “never made any money” from BHR Partners, the company he founded that struck the deal, “either from his former role as a director, or on account of his equity investment, which he is actively seeking to divest.”

Then and Now

When Biden served as Vice President, he helped launch Obama’s 2009 “U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue.” At the time, it seemed that Washington and Beijing could work together toward common good in the service of mutual interests. Those early efforts arguably produced tangible results, as when both countries signed up to the Paris Climate Agreement in 2016, together representing 40% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. “We are moving the world significantly towards the goal we have set,” Obama said of the nations’ cooperation. China also “tightened its controls on weapons sold to Iran” in response to U.S. pressure, according to a Brookings Institution review, and the countries worked together to keep North Korea in check.

“There was very broad bipartisan support for a strategy towards China… that mixed engagement with China, and counterbalancing China by keeping our defenses strong, pushing on human rights, and especially working with allies, like Japan, and Australia,” says Green, the former Bush NSC official.

The mood soured, however, by the second Obama/Biden term, with the Obama Administration decrying thousands of cyberattacks a day on the U.S. government by Chinese military hackers, and later arresting a Chinese national for the theft of millions of government employees’ personal records from the Office of Personnel Management by a secretive Chinese military hacking unit, leading to a bilateral anti-hacking pact that the Trump Administration later accused the Chinese of violating.

Obama and Biden also negotiated the TPP—which Trump swiftly pulled out of after his inauguration in 2017—to gather together 12 regional Pacific economies, representing 40% of the world’s trade, into a single trading market to offset China’s economic bullying. And Obama’s military challenged China’s construction of an artificial island and military base in the South China Sea with its own “presence patrols” of U.S. Naval vessels steaming through sea channels in international waters that China was trying to claim for its own.

All of the Obama Administration’s efforts were eventually swallowed up and erased, like the wakes of those U.S. Naval ships, in part by Trump’s TPP departure, but mostly by the steady waves of a strategically planned and clinically executed Chinese campaign to widen its economic influence, build its military might, and become a diplomatic superpower that cannot be ignored on any major international issue.

The U.S. public hasn’t paid much heed to China’s long-game, but the COVID-19 crisis has caused more Americans to see China negatively, according to a Pew Research Service poll released in July. It’s against that backdrop that Biden will have to explain to information-overwhelmed American viewers why he once entertained the notion that China’s Communist Party could be reasoned with, and how his policies would produce a different result than the steadily increasing cold war between Beijing and Washington.

China-focused political economist Derek Scissors, of the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, believes both candidates are weak on China. He says the first phase of the President’s trade deal is a “failure,” with U.S. exports to China “far behind schedule,” U.S. portfolio investment in China soaring, Beijing’s hack-and-grab theft of U.S. intellectual property continuing, and Trump’s sanctions having little effect on Chinese tech companies’ predatory behavior.

On the other hand, Biden’s China record is one of “wishful thinking,” Scissors says, mostly focused on global climate change initiatives. “The Obama Administration was paralyzed by hope for meaningful Chinese cooperation, instead getting an increasingly nasty dictatorship,” he says. “Biden’s move away from that approach is unconvincing so far.”

Retired Amb. Joseph DeTrani, former CIA director of East Asia Operations, says both candidates behaved appropriately for the China they faced at the time. In Biden’s engagement with China as a Senator during the 1980s and 1990s “bilateral relations were solid,” he says, so cooperative moves like championing Beijing’s entry into the World Trade Organization were appropriate. When tensions later rose, the Obama Administration announced its “pivot” to East Asia, concerned about China’s behavior in the South and East China Seas and its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, which ostensibly aimed to improve China’s physical access to markets by building roads, bridges and ports globally, but instead often trapped countries in debt-ridden deals that forced them to forfeit ownership of the projects to the Chinese.

DeTrani says Trump can argue that he, rather than his predecessors, acted against Beijing’s predatory trade practices, including “a very unfavorable historical trade imbalance with China, something previous administrations ignored.” He points out that Trump’s position hardened when it became clear China hadn’t shared data on the pandemic “in a timely way,” and with its crackdown on Hong Kong, the proliferation of Uighur reeducation camps and other human rights abuses.

With China’s military growing, already outpacing the U.S. Navy, and its still-expanding economy keeping it on track to eclipse U.S. power in the next decade, according to the Australia-based Lowy Institute, the next U.S. president will be facing a formidable adversary that no recent American leader has managed to check.

from TIME https://ift.tt/3n3S5l2

Mack jabs Calipari, then says Kentucky-L'ville on

Messi: Attempted exit was for Barca's own good

Lionel Messi says he acted with Barcelona's best interests in mind when trying to engineer a move away from Camp Nou this summer.

from www.espn.com - TOP https://ift.tt/33eCNSI

QB Mahomes, fiancée reveal baby on the way

Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes and fiancée Brittany Matthews announced on social media Tuesday that they will soon be having a baby.

from www.espn.com - TOP https://ift.tt/2HJ8wD9

Monday, 28 September 2020

Scientists create a microscopic robot that ‘walks’

The scientists behind a microscopic "walking" robot hope their tech could one day be used against cancer.

from BBC News - Home https://ift.tt/3463esW

The cat who hitched a lift on a worldwide tour

Former Scottish rugby player Dean Nicholson met a lifelong friend as he cycled around the world.

from BBC News - Home https://ift.tt/3i6gUck

Ai Weiwei: 'Too late' to curb China's global influence

The Chinese artist and dissident says the West should have worried about China decades ago.

from BBC News - Home https://ift.tt/3cEqwd4

Life: Doctor Foster spin-off explores 'loneliness in big cities'

BBC One drama Life follows residents of Manchester whose lives intertwine unexpectedly.

from BBC News - Home https://ift.tt/30hjBSb

'If you steal music, you aren't a real music fan'

The music industry is trying to clampdown on the latest form of music piracy known as stream-ripping.

from BBC News - Home https://ift.tt/2Gb8ALk

Scientists create a microscopic robot that ‘walks’

The scientists behind a microscopic "walking" robot hope their tech could one day be used against cancer.

from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/3463esW

Why Gary Sanchez isn't catching Gerrit Cole in Game 1 for the Yankees

Handling an ace is a big responsibility, but the 2019 All-Star catcher's struggles in every phase of the game forced a tough choice.

from www.espn.com - MLB https://ift.tt/3i7zjW5